The Volleyball Arm Swing 3.0: Creating a Sustainable Swing
Initially Published 12/19/2019
Please, forgive me. I have teased at this article for a long time. However, if I had rushed to write it any sooner, it would be worse for wear. Unknowingly, you wanted me to lollygag. I first wrote about the arm swing in 2012. It was a good start. The 2017 follow up to it was a fat, pudgy, and over-complicated mess. I was too close to the subject and wrote everything down instead of what was useful. Now, things have changed.
The primary delay for this article has been the writing of something else—a book. You can sign up to know about the book’s release here.
This article is only about two things, really. It’s about how the human organism is designed and how it learns.
Since sports require skills, improving them is perhaps the one thing coaches are responsible for, by the current definition of the role. However, most coaches know almost nothing about the topic. A paralyzing perplexity that has many causes. (The causes are addressed in my book.) There’s a significant and overlooked difference between skill and technique. Technique is shaping and teaching one tool of many. Skill is knowing when to use the tool. Often times, techniques are taught in excess without ever being given the opportunity to use them in the right context. Secondly, most techniques taught are wasting time. They are often unnecessary, taught poorly, or perpetuated myths. When technique is well understood, it can be a great aid in the advancement of skill. However, most coaches need to take a deep and hard look at what they are teaching.
Coaches who talk about technique must also understand some basic principles of human movement. Asking for sport techniques without understanding simple foundations of what is possible with the tool at hand — the human body — is a bit like trying to optimize and race an F1 car without any understanding of how the engine puts power through the wheels to the ground.
A two-part perspective shift is desperately needed within the realm of athletics. Currently, practitioners and coaches first look to adapt the athlete for the sport — like trying to get a driver to drive a car fast while the car is barely staying together. It doesn’t matter how fast you drive if you can’t finish the race. A philosophy with more sense is optimizing the human movement system first, and how it performs in sport second. Meaning, the driver is safe, the car endures, and the driver and car have a safe relationship between skill and engine power. That way, the car is always available to improve driving skills and have fun. Mind you, there are no replacement parts for this biological vehicle either, and big injuries leave dents that last and last. Bottom line: optimize the human first and the athlete within second.
The second perspective to adopt is the idea that the body and nature signal what is best, and we simply need to listen to what they say. When a child is no longer having fun in the umpteenth game during the umpteenth tournament, it is not laziness or a lack of discipline, it is his biology trying to get him to rest by removing interest from the damaging activity. Promoting natural movement environments for humans will yield exponential results. What are natural movement environments? Variations that are fun, simple, and novel are what our biology loves and requires. So give it diverse and novel environments and games, and exploration fueled by curiosity instead of restricted by anxiety. These two perspectives are all we need to progress in this article and in athletics.
The basic fundamentals of human movement are: squatting, hip hinging, sprinting, running, jumping, throwing, climbing, hanging, and swinging. It’s most odd that many volleyball players can hit a volleyball with exquisite power and accuracy, but when they are asked to throw a ball, you wonder if this is his or her first time… Throwing well is not a prerequisite to hitting a volleyball but it certainly helps. These fundamentals are best served when they are the products of games and play. Run fast, slow, long, short, and sometimes random directions. Chase and be chased. Jump high and far and in varied ways. Climb walls, trees, parents, friends, whatever. Swing smilingly from branches, bars, and overhung walls. Hang daily from something. Throw and catch. If all these movements are seen consistently throughout life, and as a product of games and play, there won’t be a whole lot of nitty-gritty mechanics issues to clean up. Optimize the human first and the athlete will blossom as a result.
It should be noted that these responsibilities of movement and skills are not exclusive to coaches. They can just as easily be the athlete’s — a level of autonomy and ownership that is most excellent if you ask me.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s proceed with our brief jaunt into the realms of movement and skill for volleyball. So saddle up, grab a notebook, and come along with me for this written ride.
Organism Design
The shoulders and arms that humans possess are the offspring of primate shoulders. They share many of the same traits. Now, imagine if you had a pet monkey, yet removed any and all things for it to climb on, hang from, or swing to and fro? Not only would you have an angsty monkey, but you would also be removing the very things it needs to be a monkey!
A rich overhead environment and all associated behaviors are what his shoulder and body expect and require to be robustly functional. This monkey deprived of monkey-ing around results in an increased risk of injury when the monkey decides to suddenly grab a banana flung through the air, play volleyball, or throw heaps of poo.
Consider the environment of the modern athlete. We see the exact same deprived scenario that our poor hypothetical monkey has suffered. Our shoulders are designed for arboreal environments yet are without any of the vertical challenges that they need. Furthermore, the rotator cuff itself did not show up in mammals until overhead behavior was necessitated by the environments in which they lived. We are fish out of water, of sorts. More accurately stated, we are monkeys without trees.
Realize that overhead sports, volleyball especially, are asking athletes to perform overhead without the primary and fundamental environments that ensure shoulder integrity! Volleyball organizations should have climbing, hanging, and swinging environments for their athletes to utilize and benefit from. If you optimize the human first, then adapt it for a sport later, you will have a body that is prepared to perform at a high level, year after year. To ask for innumerable repetitions overhead, without prerequisite and concurrent climbing, hanging, and swinging activities is to drastically increase the risk of injury while steering towards perilous imbalances.
Any sport played enough will start teetering movement homeostasis towards dangerous imbalances. When sport is in excess, as it currently is today, it should be treated like a poison. Tournaments are overdoses and year-round structured practices are chronic use; sobriety is needed from time to time. There are two questions that everyone in sports is overlooking yet should be asking, “How do I mitigate the damaging effects of my sport?” and “How do I return to normal, balanced, movement, when my sports career inevitably ends?”
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The entire upper half of the human body is designed to do many things, as we now know. Throwing and hitting any projectile out of the air, however, is a downstream byproduct of those primary activities: climbing, hanging, and swinging. Playing overhead sports without the primary activities is putting the cart before the horse, or expecting a tree to grow while restricting its roots from growing into the soil, or like trying to make a child without the parents, or wearing underwear outside of pants.
How you can put the horse before the cart is simple; provide diverse environments and games. For some coaches, doing nothing is better than doing anything at all — that may be difficult, however. Let kids play, spontaneously. And, obviously, provide environments that offer climbing, hanging, and swinging.
Tragically, the way volleyball is played across the world makes it a terrible sport for prepubescent or small kids. Our brains are phenomenal problem solvers, for better or for worse. When children are met with the task of getting an adult sized volleyball over a seven or eight foot net, they will find a way to get it over, regardless of any measure of biomechanical sustainability. The way their brains choose to accomplish this movement challenge may lead to injuries years later. It is too difficult a challenge for them to do well. Foresight is key. For an adult, this would be like trying to hit a heavy basketball over a 30-50 foot wall, I imagine. Perhaps even higher — the gifts of puberty give exponential increases in strength.
Preteen volleyball should be played on a variety of low nets with an assortment of light balls. Nets of what height? Around the same height as those used within tennis. Pickleball nets are fantastic. Balls of what weight? As light as can be. Like a beach ball, the non-volleyball ones. Sporadically toss in a heavier ball from time to time, and a higher badminton-like net. The lighter and more buoyant the ball, the better. Light and big balls can float in the air longer, thus giving the children more time to figure out how to get it over the net. Most young brains are not yet able to calculate trajectories and body positions needed within the time allotted by normal balls. Hence why you see so many young kids miss the ball entirely — they didn’t have enough time.
At this point, it is important to note that I am not advocating for sterile environments for young kids. Quite the contrary. I want to see novel, diverse, and appropriately challenging environments and games. I want to see horses before carts and underpants under pants.
Organism & Arm Swing
If you rid yourself of romanticized notions about how special the volleyball arm swing is, you can see that it is not much different than actions in baseball, tennis, badminton, or even soccer. All are various rotational patterns of the spine to move limbs to propel objects. Sometimes, the body dances amazingly to conjure unorthodox ways to score points, and we want to allow for those opportunities.
You or your athletes may end up with the most biomechanically sound arm swing science could ever ask for; however, if the tissues in the body are not tolerant to countless attacks, the risk of injury is still high. I wish this issue was black and white, but it is incalculable shades of grey. All we can do is lower probabilities of injury and increase probabilities of performance.
The primary analogy that is offered in my book is that movement is a cost from one’s Movement Bank account. These costs can return dividends, if cared for and smartly invested. One can also have high or low interest rates on these expenditures and loans, and bankruptcy can happen with irresponsible spending. I will utilize some Movement Banking language going forward to help get messages from me to you.
Due to the sheer number of serves and attacks in volleyball, we need to ensure that the cost of each attack is low and has a small interest rate. This is why we value a safe and sound “technique.” Astute observers notice that rotational athletes who endure and succeed have commonalities in their technique. (There are always outliers, and they will be discussed.) The technique is largely the same that I have preached on the preceding two blogs. A mash-up of brilliant rotational athletes who had long and healthy careers can be seen below, with some annotations from me. The annotations are largely about inertia, a topic I get to later.
What I want to see and coach for is just a few things. The elbow is brought back around shoulder height, the palm faces the ground before the hips start turning forward, and the arm stays relaxed throughout the entirety of the swing. How it gets to this loaded position is of the utmost importance. The rib cage ought to be the vehicle that carries the arm as a passenger to this loaded position. For someone who has a healthy overhead environment outside of volleyball, and unobtrusive coaches, this may be automatic. For the majority who do not, it will need coaching and a change in environment. Many will lack the intrinsic stability, mobility, and awareness to attain this movement easily. It will, and should, take time. A quick change will appease egos of parents, coaches, and athletes, but it is dangerous because an individual’s tissues are accustomed to high loads of a different flavor of stress. Quick changes are chancy. Biology is patient with change.
For those who have malnourished movement environments, it will be increasingly hard to feel what they are doing. Therefore, it will be hard for them to own their movements. They are driving the car but have little idea how to control it or where it is in space. Movements and sensation of movement are highly correlated. Some will need to feel the movement in simple, intrinsic, and isolated conditions before they can progress to something chaotic and externally focused.
I have seen a plethora of promulgated techniques that preach that a high elbow, or palm facing backwards, or something else entirely, is “natural.” They are lost and claiming to be found. However, I appreciate that they are sniffing in the right direction and well-intentioned. When they are asked to provide evidence for its “natural-ness” is usually when I hear a symphony of crickets or poorly made rationalizations.
What is natural has two sides: what is natural for humans and what is natural for an individual at given moments in time. If a coach sees an odd, or unexplained technique, it did not materialize out of the ether. It occurs because the athlete’s brain is choosing it as the most stable position for their body, at this phase in their life, in order to accomplish the task(s). So the next question to ask is, what caused such an odd deviation from normal movement?
Our brains will sacrifice biomechanical integrity in order to accomplish outcomes, which is quite similar to how many people live miserable lives yet accomplish a lot. Deviations from the ubiquitous natural usually occur because of concurrent environmental maladies. Long term, we want to see humans moving as humans are designed. Our design is the offspring of our environments, which must be cared for and created with care.
In the 2012 blog, I used Greg Maddux as a great example of what we want, and I stand by that. Now to elaborate on some facts in baseball — there is not one 300-game winning baseball pitcher who has his elbow above his shoulders or has his palm facing away from his head. They all start their throws with their elbows in line with their shoulders and palms approximately facing the ground. Furthermore, there isn’t a healthy 200+ game-winning pitcher with a high elbow, that I have found. Why I choose to look at this category of athletes is simple — they have stayed healthy long enough to win more than everyone else.
The volleyball arm swing isn’t so special that it gets a hall pass for using a high elbow. You’d be hard-pressed to find rotational athletes who have lasted and succeeded and used a high elbow. Volleyball culture seems to be like the stubborn kid in the corner refusing to play with the other kids…
Thus far, there has only been one research article to compare the two main types of attack: the attack I promote and the traditional “bow and arrow” techniques. To summarize its conclusions, the researchers found that the low arm position is safer and produces a faster ball speed.
I have looked for further evidence for this type of swing and only have what the depths of the Internet can provide — which isn’t great. I have examined the careers of many athletes in contrast with their arm technique. Secondly, I have compiled a list of professional volleyball players with various techniques, as well as available injury histories.
I wish I could call up each one of these athletes and talk to them, but I can’t. I have found that those who have the elbow position that we prefer have not been sidelined by shoulder injuries. Those who do not typically have intermittent careers.
The following is not a complete list of everyone in the world, because that would be quite ridiculous, but what I feel is a good enough precedent to speak to the value of these mechanics.
Here are some of my findings and slides to follow:
Too High Elbow Arm Swings
Kerri Walsh-Jennings and Brooke Sweat both have extremely similar swings and the rotator cuff surgeries to match.
Alix Klineman’s traditional bow and arrow arm swing hasn’t led to shoulder injury so far; however, I consider it a high risk.
Yumilka Ruiz had an illustrious and long career with a high elbow arm swing. No doubt, her growing up in Cuba prepared her tissues to sustain this high risk arm swing. As a child, she must have created a large enough Movement Bank account that she could afford to take high interest loans for a long time.
Lucas Saatkamp, I assume, also had a childhood that provided for a large Movement Bank account balance. From what I have read and heard, a childhood in Brazil is very different than affluent America. He has one of the highest starting arm swings in professional volleyball and has lasted a very long time. His relaxed follow-through is fantastic and helps keep him healthy.
Taylor Crabb. His perpetual use of KinesioTape should be a red flag for those who try to emulate his swing. Nonetheless, he’s had a pretty consistent career so far. I hope it stays that way despite having a swing with a high interest rate.
Taylor Sander. His high elbow and his brand of follow-through creates high interest rates for him. I would prefer to see more of his body help decelerate his arm in its follow-through, instead of just his shoulder. And an arm that begins with a lower elbow and hand position.
“Goldilocks” Swings (Middle Elbow. All of these athletes have phenomenal arm swings and the health to match, except Giba.)
Clay Stanley - Long, consistent career.
Murilo - Long, consistent career.
Giba.* Long career.
While I do like the position his arm gets to early in the swing, his follow-through, or lack thereof, is what I believe led to shoulder issues in his career.
Matt Anderson - Long, consistent career.
Kelsey Robinson - On track to have a long and consistent career.
Mireya Luis (a personal favorite) - Long and consistent career.
Too Low Elbow Arm Swings
Gabi Guimaraes
David Lee (circa 2008) - Long and consistent career.
The Converts (those who changed their arm swings to the middle position)
David Lee now owns the arm swing I advocate. The impetus for this change I do not know.
Maksim Mikhaylov had a high elbow, ran into shoulder trouble in 2013 changed his arm swing to the one we are discussing, and has had a healthy shoulder since. While he still shows shades of the past from time to time, his technique is much better.
Jordan Burgess is a former Stanford All-American and someone I had the pleasure of helping. She came to me with a high elbow, lackluster follow-through, and a frustratingly frequently history of injuries. After making these changes to her arm swing she had an injury-free and pain-free professional season in Germany. Click here to learn more about her training with me at Apiros.
Much of the research talks about being overhead as an extremely stressful position. I would say it is potentially high risk rather than extremely stressful. This position presents a risk because there is less contact surface area with the arm and the socket, thus relying on muscle and connective tissue for integrity. These tissues, across all westernized civilizations, are ill-equipped to handle repetitive overhead movements. The issue is, the cultures that come with modern civilization have omitted overhead environments. Overhead athletes would be in significantly lower risk categories if they frequently climbed, hung, and swung from things on walls and above.
An overly simplified explanation of why those environments are useful is as follows: the arm swing projects the arm out of the socket. Climbing and swinging pulls it into the socket, relatively. The arm swing is mostly centrifugal force — a projective force away from the center. Climbing and swinging can be mostly centripetal forces — pulling towards center. This is because in one, the hand moves freely, and in the others, the hand is fixed. Hanging, having the arm fixed and the body free to move, will help prepare the body for climbing and swinging activities. If these activities are new to you, please proceed slowly, cautiously, and with a great deal of common sense.
When opposing forces are greatly unequal is typically when injury happens. We want balanced pushing and pulling forces during the arm swing. In this case, a rotator cuff tear could also be defined as projective forces beating receptive forces into submission (centrifugal forces being in great excess to centripetal forces).
In the images below, please note how the arrows of force have flip-flopped.
You now see that in the attack, the arm moves away from the fixed center of the body. In climbing, hanging, and swinging, the hand is fixed and the center (body) moves towards the hand. This philosophy can be viewed as a simple and common sense approach, balancing projective and receptive activities. Yin and yang.
You see, this isn’t a technique problem, it is an environmental and behavioral one. What I’m really proposing is an overhaul of environments. Second to that is the arm swing technique. The arm technique I advocate simply lowers risk by starting the arm swing in a more balanced position, and it produces faster ball speed as researched thus far.
To repeat myself, the starting position we want is simple: before the hips rotate forward, the elbow is at the same height as the shoulders and palm faces the ground. From a different plane of view, the elbow should not be behind the shoulder but rather in line, or in front of, as if hugging a very wide bear. Or imagine standing in a door frame and reaching both elbows towards the sides.
How the elbow gets there, I repeat, is via the rib cage. The chest rotates “open,” bringing the arm as a passive passenger. From then on, it is a roller coaster of a ride for the arm. There is no more coaching or cueing of the arm. We want to avoid yanking the elbow back to open the chest. If we want to unload rotation from the spine, we need to load it first.
How the arm goes forward to contact the ball is via the rotation of the hips. The hips are the front engine of the roller coaster, pulling the arm along in the back for a whippy ride. The name of the roller coaster that the arm is aboard is called Inertia. Some other examples of inertia can be seen below.
INERTIA EXAMPLES
Why you need to wear a seatbelt, especially if you’re a giraffe.
What happens when a hamster stops running while on its wheel?
When you allow the arm to be a passenger on the Inertia roller coaster, you create a relaxed and fast arm swing powered by the entire body. After the ride is over, I like to see that the right foot, the back foot, has landed either beside or in front of the left foot. Assuming the athlete jumped with their right foot behind their left, this is just a simple check to see if they rotated in the air. If they consistently do not rotate, then I will likely intervene with some coaching cues and environments and games that promote rotation.
We are done with the sensible stuff. Now to tackle some nonsensical myths…
ARM POSITION AT CONTACT
This is typically address via either or both of the following statements:
“You’re dropping your elbow.”
Or,
“You need to reach higher.”
These cues are misguided. The brain will do whatever it takes to hit the ball. If the elbow is dropped, it is because it needs to be in order to contact the ball. These cues of adjusting the arm to contact the ball are ironically inaccurate. If the athlete is consistently making low contact with the ball, there are typically two potential causes.
One, perhaps their shoulder does not have the integrity to reach high overhead, and cuing for this invites more risk.
Secondly, perhaps where they are in relation to the ball forces them to reach low to make contact. This, then, is a spacing problem, not an arm position problem. The athlete’s perception of where he or she needs to be to contact the ball must be refined. This improvement can take place by changing the games, the sets, the net height, the ball, and asking for exaggerated changes in spatial positioning.
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Now that we’ve wiped our hands clean of that mess, on to the next — wrist snap.
Nope.
Just don’t.
Not going to go there.
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PIKING
The arm swing, nor any other overhead sport, is a pike. It just isn’t. Piking is a learned behavior and rarely something from organic self-organization. The attack is a rotation driven by the hips with very slight shades of piking. Of course, this is all beside the point. If athletes had appropriately scaled and varied environments, we’d hardly even have to coach rotation! A child who experiences lots of different activities like throwing, batting, golfing, kicking etc. (a normal childhood) will most likely rotate automatically. It will not happen the first time they try to hit a ball out of the air, but eventually it will. Especially if they keep playing other rotational games.
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Now for follow-through, or lack thereof. You would never see a soccer player try to stop their leg immediately after kicking a ball. How about tennis? Never once has a tennis player decided to stop their arm immediately after any contact. Golf? You’d be laughed off the course if you omitted your follow-through. What if a 100m sprinter just decided to come to a dead stop once they reached the finish line. Or imagine a Formula 1 car coming to a screeching stop at the finish line, from 200mph… All right, that’s all I have to say about that. Common (comical) sense, people.
What I will address, however, is positioning and variability of follow-through. We want to see a relaxed arm follow where the body brought it, which means sometimes it will go across the body; sometimes it will come by the side of the body. Variability of movement is a sign of health. When we see the arm follow through in just one way, danger looms in the shadows. We do not want to force it one direction or another. Just trust that the body knows what to do, and let it. Risk increases if we religiously abide by a follow-through that always falls to the side. The follow-through is a relaxed side-effect caused by where and how the brain has decided to hit the ball.
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I hope by now you see that there’s really a whole lot of wasted conversation and cognitive load issued by coaches, governing bodies, and regional organizations. Coaches: just get the arm in a safe starting position, then focus on creating environments that promote advancement of skill, health, and fun. Simple. Your worth is not derived by how much you say, do, or show, but by however you value it.
Unfortunately, this article still has not revealed the elephant in the room. The greatest miscreant is the schedule demanded of youth athletes. I’ve heard about certain national teams saying that their players need to be able to withstand over 1000 jumps per week. Not because it is necessary for competition schedules but because it is what the coaches demand. In some countries, culture allows it to be even higher.
No matter how perfect the arm swing is, or the environment, the schedules athletes face today are asinine. Ludicrous. Absolutely bonkers. Underwear is being worn outside the pants, and too few are noticing!
Most athletes make venture capitalist-like expenditures weekend after weekend, without having any time for investments to accrue, or even being able to afford this kind of spending! They are in debt!
This delinquent elephant carries a misunderstood expectation: the body heals, recovers, and grows quickly. It does not. The body takes a lot longer to heal than current culture believes. Next time you get a scrape on your skin, notice how long it takes to heal. The details are discussed in my book, but the rule of thumb I propose is as follows; every day of tournament play or competition needs at least double that in rest and time away from the poisonous activity. This doesn’t mean become a vegetable for those days, it just means take it easy, and don’t play the same sport you just overdosed on.
Even the best childhoods and best techniques in the world can only do so much when lowering probabilities of injury. When you change your perspective to viewing the human body as perfect, then you’re forced to look elsewhere for issues. The body is a product of over 400 million years of evolution! Most likely, our relatively infantile cultures and beliefs are the opportunities to be wrestled. Our problems arise due to user error rather than faults of the hardware (the body).
If we mix some foresight, knowledge, and discipline, we can radically improve the health of athletes in this sport. Ultimately, this responsibility falls on the shoulders of athletes and their parents. If you want to see some changes in your life, then make them. Athletes shall no longer be at the mercy of coaches. If you don’t take responsibility for your life, then who will? Sport needs to be a collaborative effort between athletes and coaches, rather than a commonly seen one-sided tyranny.
Parents, as the financiers of youth clubs and organizations, you have the opportunity to demand more sustainable and smart schedules, instead of the binged athletic weekends that are convenient for school and work schedules.
In regards to the “what” of the arm swing, I’ve covered all topics worth any words. Now we must ask the question, “how does the human organism learn best?” For that, you will have to wait for the follow up to this article. What you can do in the meantime is create and polish this tool in your toolbox. Here is my video progression series to teach you how to create this swing. However, it does not specifically address how to make it show up in the heat of competition with stalwart resilience. That is the goal of the next article. Sign up below to be notified of its release.
